392 WOMAN

Her husband, to whom she was married almost in his boy-
hood, led a very licentious life. Theodor Schiemann, the
historian of the Slavs, relates how Casimir at the court of
Budapesth fell in love with Clara von Zach, daughter of a
court official. Casimir's sister, Queen Elizabeth of Hun-
gary, aided him in seducing the innocent maiden. The
father of the latter, maddened by the disgrace, broke into
the royal hall to avenge himself upon the betrayers of his
child, and wounded the royal couple, but he was finally
slain. A terrible judgment was passed upon all the mem-
bers of the family of Zach: Clara herself was mutilated
and chased, as a beast might be, to death, but her royal
seducer did not interpose a barrier to her punishment.
This event throws a lurid light on the mediaeval court life
in Hungary and Poland.

After the death of Lithuanian Anna, Casimir betrothed
himself to Margareth of Bavaria, who is said to have died
of grief at the approaching marriage to the hated Polish
king. His next wife, Adelheid of Hesse, was neglected
and ill treated, and when the king married another woman,
Christina Rokiczan, she left Poland forever. Christina
shared the fate of her predecessor, and the king married
in 1365 Hedwig, Duchess of Sagan, during the lifetime of
his undivorced wife Adelheid. The Pope, however, who
had at first called that marriage "a public disgrace,"
granted him a divorce from his former wife to legitimatize
the new union. We may draw interesting comparisons
between that otherwise great and tolerant but morally
depraved Polish king and Henry VIII. of England.

The first great Polish woman in the glowing light of his-
tory is Jadwiga, daughter of King Louis of Hungary and
Poland, the legitimate queen of Poland in default of a male
heir, crowned on October 15, 1384, in the Cathedral of
Cracow. Betrothed in her childhood to an Austrian prince,



WOMEN OF POLAND 393

who now came to Cracow and quickly won her heart and
actually consummated the marriage, she was nevertheless
compelled by the Polish nobles, who hated the German
and forced him to flee for his life, to accept Jagiello, the
supreme duke of the Lithuanians, a still barbarous, pagan
people, but whose power extended down to Kief. This
union was a political stroke of the first magnitude. Jagiello
and the Lithuanians became Christianized in the Latin
form, the united countries became the greatest power in
eastern Europe, and therewith the overwhelming might of
the Teutonic Order was broken forever. The dynasty
of the Jagiellos was founded and reigned supreme in
Poland for two hundred years (1386-1572). When Jad-
wiga, a great queen and woman, died in 1399, the Poles,
otherwise unruly, retained as their ruler King Wladislaw
Jagiello, who from a great but savage pagan had become a
good Christian and a strong statesman. The destruction
of the Teutonic Order in the battle of Tannenberg, 1410,
one of the greatest and most decisive battles in history,
insured for centuries the hegemony of Poland in eastern
Europe. Of this battle we have an interesting letter from
Jagiello to Anna, his second wife, whom he addressed
from the camp on the battlefield as "noble princess, illus-
trious and dear consort": "We slew numberless enemies,
not through the strength of Our arm, or the multitude of
Our warriors, but solely with the aid of Our Lord, who
may further us in power and virtue!" This document
not only shows Jagiello's adherence to Christianity, but
also proves the respect paid to a Polish queen, even though
she was inferior to Jadwiga, who was the reorganizer and
refounder not only of a mighty realm, but also of the
famous old University of Cracow, which before her time
had sunk into complete insignificance. She had obtained in
1 397 a papal bull for the foundation of a theological faculty,



394



WOMAN



and insured the existence of the university for the future
by rich legacies bequeathed on her deathbed.

One century and a half later a royal romance with a
tragic ending was enacted in Poland. King Sigismund
(Augustus) II. (1547-1572), on the death of his first
wife Elizabeth, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I., married
secretly Barbara Radziwil, of the most illustrious Lithua-
nian family. On his accession to the throne he avowed
his marriage, and the princess accompanied him to Cracow
to attend the funeral of his father. The diet of Piotrkow
believing a union with a foreign princess more profitable
to Poland, demanded the annulment of his marriage with
Barbara, but the king resisted, and saw her crowned as
his queen in 1550. Six months after her coronation, how-
ever, she died suddenly, probably poisoned by her mother-
in-law, the hated Italian, Bona Sforza, who as queen had
exercised a baneful influence upon Polish life. The un-
fortunate Queen Barbara is idealized in Polish lays, and
the portraits preserved of her show beauty of form and
features.

It may be interesting to note the relation of the great
Polish king Jan Sobieski (1674-1696), the liberator of
Vienna, and in truth of Europe, from the Turkish con-
querors, to his wife, who exercised an almost complete
dominion over him. We have an admirable description
of the Polish court at the time of Sobieski; of his extraor-
dinary wife and daughter, and of social affairs there, in a
report by a contemporary, an anonymous French abbe,
whose manuscript was found in the Bibliotheque Mazarin,
in Paris, and was published for the first time in 1858.
He describes the Polish nobility as turbulent in the Diet
and at home, tells of their luxury and their habits, the
high esteem in which ladies of high birth were held, and
the scandalous treatment of peasant women, as well as the



WOMEN OF POLAND 395

absolute power of the s^lachta over the life and honor of
the serfs and their women.

Sobieski's wife was a French woman, but she became
completely Polonized: Marie Casimire d'Arquien, originally
maid of honor of Marie Louise, wife of Wladislaw and of his
brother Casimir successively, had been married first to the
Polish magnate Zamoiski, and after his death to Sobieski.
She is said to have induced her royal consort to assist
Austria against the Turks, very much against the wishes
of Louis XIV. of France, who desired the power of Aus-
tria to be broken forever. The King of France had incurred
her ill will by refusing to elevate her father to the rank of a
duke. The queen had the strongest Polish interests and
sympathies; the letters of Sobieski to her are all in Polish;
they are of the greatest historical value, as the king in-
forms her constantly of his progress; also the personal
element in them is highly interesting; they abound in
words of endearment: "My charming and incomparable
Mariette." " Only joy of my soul." The queen, though
beautiful and passionately loved by Sobieski, was an ava-
ricious, despotic, jealous, revengeful woman. After the
death of the great king she lived in Italy and France, and
died in 1716 in the castle of Blois which Louis XIV. had
given to her. Her remains rest with those of Sobieski in
the Cathedral of Cracow.

The description of the decline of Poland under the Saxon
kings, of the political and moral decay of the country
under foreign rulers, does not belong to our theme, since
the national element in the social life of the unfortunate
country is wanting.

If so much attention has heretofore been given to royal
women, it was done in the conviction that, since, after all,
the history of culture is a comparatively modern branch of
scholarship, national life in periods not too clearly defined



396 WOMAN

in history is best depicted in the highest circles, which,
for good or for evil, will ever serve as a model or a type
to be imitated by the classes below. We need only to
glance at the life of fashion, so essential to women in all
stages of society, to realize the truth of this conclusion.

In spite of all class distinctions, which were stronger in
Poland than in any other country of western civilization,
the Polish type of womanhood was nevertheless more
recognizable throughout all the classes than anywhere
else. In spite of all their modesty and womanly beauty,
Polish women were at all times political enthusiasts; at all
epochs we find among them commanding natures, resolute
and manly patriots. Patriotic motives governed their
loves, their marriages, their motherhood, and at no time
more than since the partition of their beloved country.
They excel in hospitality, which is their particular metier,
and upon which they lavish, almost frivolously, their
earthly goods. Courage, bravery, even heroism, are com-
mon traits, and are presupposed in their men as prerequi-
sites to winning female affections. Ideals prevailed at all
times; and for ideals, often very empty and unstatesman-
like, they sacrificed themselves, and also the life blood of
their men, nay, their commonwealth, in fatal contrast to
the self-interested, cool-headed, and cold-hearted states-
manship of their well-disciplined German neighbors. Upon
this noble, but unpractical, national characteristic is to be
based also their lack of an economic sense; work as such
for material reward was always, it may be said, despised
by Polish women; money was, and is, considered a sordid
means for a purpose; and the same training, inculcated
into the souls of the sons of Polish women, was one of the
chief reasons for the political downfall of the nation. A
too highly developed sense of individual liberty, the pur-
suit of ideals, impracticable even for their own people, and



WOMEN OF POLAND 397

a contempt for everyday work and commonplace activity,
have destroyed Poland. The eminent Danish literary his-
torian Georg Brandes, in his Poland, reports characteristic-
ally this significant remark by a distinguished Polish lady:
"What company they invited me to meet! It was made
up of workmen, advocates whom we pay, manufacturers
who sell goods, doctors into whose hands three rubles are
slipped for a visit."

It is true that it was not always thus with Polish
women, and certainly not with those of the poorer classes.
In early times the education of woman consisted in prayer
and work. Learning was not a womanly requisite; the
domestic and agricultural work in the fields belonged to
women, while the tavern was too frequently the abode of
the man (chlop). Piety is a most genuine reality with
Polish women; they were at all times a rock of the Cath-
olic Church. Chastity was the most common virtue, and
was strictly enforced. Nitschmann, the German histo-
rian of Polish literature, mentions the fact that as late as
A. D. 1645, a young gentlewoman at the Polish court, who
had entertained improper relations with several courtiers,
was condemned to death, together with her lovers. Strict
discipline went so far that, according to old Polish custom,
maidens were chastised with rods every Friday to remind
them of Christ's sufferings and to bring them nearer to God.
The prayer of innocent children was reputed more effect-
ive, which was a strong incentive for young women to
keep themselves pure as long as possible. No wonder
that such women attained, in the course of time, a moral
supremacy over their men, and that nowhere in Europe such
a genuine deference was offered to women as in Poland.
The almost supreme rule of the Polish mother over her
sons is proverbial. With all her tenderness for her chil-
dren, it is the Polish mother who drove the youth of the



398 WOMAN

land to an almost hopeless struggle against the foreign con-
queror, and to death on the altar of the fatherland. No-
where has the Spartan mother's "Either with the shield
or upon the shield" become such an often repeated reality
as in the Polish insurrections against Russia.

Until the entrance of French fashions, which, however,
especially influenced the higher classes, the costume of
Polish women of all classes was national, beautiful, and
many-colored. A cap of fine linen and a diadem were worn;
the neck was left uncovered, as with the Polish men, and
was adorned with strings of beads or jewels; rich furs
ornamented the edges of their garments. The unmarried
women wore fine silken or linen aprons, which are even
to-day an indispensable part of the costume of Polish
peasant girls at their social functions, for example, dances
and spinning parties. A gaily colored cloth, artistically
wound around the head, was always worn by the Polish
girl of the lower classes; a white veil, which, however,
must not cover the face, as with Mohammedan women,
covered the heads of the maidens of the higher classes.
Since the partition of Poland the gay national costume of
the Poles is prohibited in Russia, but it is still worn,
especially on festal occasions in Austria and Prussia.

The charm and beauty of Polish women is the constant
theme of the national poets. A lyric poet of the seven-
teenth century, Morsztyn, sings of the Polish virgin:

" Thou model mine, divine in all thy beauty,
Compared with whom spring's roses even languish,
O brightest star, produced on earthly meadows,
Yet unsurpassed by heaven's luminaries !

" Pure spirit, encompassed in crystal,
From which thou shinest in lofty light of virtue ;
Perfected creature by the hand of God,
My spirit's comfort and my heart's delight t"

(H. S.)



WOMEN OF POLAND 399

If during the more ancient epochs there are recorded no
Polish women who have made a mark in literary pur-
suits, this is not due to any intellectual deficit in those
otherwise brilliant and gifted representatives of the fair
sex, but to prevailing conditions, which did not permit
them to turn from the maidenly or housewifely occupa-
tions, for

" Woman's virtue never gets along
With novel-reading, sport, and song."

According to the Polish idea, man belongs on the horse,
woman to the hearth; in which respect the otherwise
antagonistic Germans and Poles do not differ essentially,
if we may accept Emperor William's formulated four
K's: Kirche (church), Kuche (kitchen), Kinder (children),
Kleider (clothing), as typical of German ideals.

Nevertheless, there were not wanting intellectual
women who contributed to the brilliancy of the Polish
genius during the golden era of their nation's literature.
It touches us strangely when the great Polish poet
Kochanowski sings in the elegies upon the death of his
little daughter Ursula, in 1580:

"Thou, Slavie Sappho, singer young and sweet,
The heiress of my poetry shouldst thou be ;
This was my hope in cheerful mood,
When lovely songs welled from thy angel lips,
Unconscious to thyself, yet sweet to me. . . .
Alas ! too early silent, didst thou part,
Snatched forth by death, beloved poetess 1 ...
Not even death sealed thy poetic lips,
That, full of woe, spoke with heart-breaking kiss :
'No longer can I, mother, serve thee now;
My place near by thy side will be no more ;
The honor of the keyboard will not fall to me ;
O Loved ones, far from you must I depart.'
Thus didst thou speak, and more, angel of death,
Which I forgot in bitter parting's woe."



400 WOMAN

The first great Polish poetess who created her title of
nobility by her own talent in the dreariest time of Polish
literature was Elizabeth Druzbacka, nee Kowalska. Born
in 1687, in Great Poland, she passed her youth under
the care of the cultured Panna Sieniawska, Chatelaine of
Cracow, married the treasurer Druzbacki, and, as a widow,
retired to the cloister of Tarnow, where she died in 1760.
Though unacquainted with foreign languages, and there-
fore with foreign literatures, she drew her inspiration
from her own poetic soul and rose high above the level
of her poetic contemporaries prophesying a renascence of
Polish literature. Her poetic works, published by Joseph
Zaluski, the famous historian and bibliographer, and
later Bishop of Kief, and republished several times since,
show much poetic beauty and graceful originality of com-
position, though the material itself betrays sometimes
the undeveloped taste of the time: she apostrophizes the
elemental forces in her poem Water, Fire, and Air; she
describes in inspired words the life of King David; the four
seasons; she writes allegorically of the fortress built by
God, locked with five gates (the soul of man, with its five
senses); she sings praises of the forests, so dear to the
Pole and to the Germans:

" The dense and shady forests glow in richest colors :
White is the birch tree, tender green its branches :
The beech tree proud shines in its youthful fulness;
The noble fir spreads green its lofty branches ;

Centuries' strength sleeps in the iron oak tree."

(H. S.)

Toward the end of the eighteenth century occurred the
great and terrible events which, culminating in the tri-
partitionment of Poland, accomplished its political destruc-
tion as an independent commonwealth. This important
event revolutionized the life, thought and aspirations of
Polish women, suddenly expanded the horizon of their



WOMEN OF POLAND 401

political ideas, and stirred them up to an understanding of
the earnestness of national existence or national annihila-
tion. These influences are constant, and ceaselessly inter-
fere with the life of Polish womanhood, either encouraging
them to great efforts or driving them to despair or dena-
tionalization. That great calamity, according to J. Mosz-
czenska in Helene Lange's Handbook of the Woman's
Movement, forced the Polish woman to take a deeper in-
terest in the condition of her country and her own position,
and impelled her to stand by the Polish man as companion
of his misfortune, his exile, his solitude in foreign lands.

When speaking of the unfortunate political situation of
Polish women, we must, however, in justice exclude their
sisters in Austrian Poland, to whom perfect freedom and
national self-development are permitted; for a free and un-
trammelled national existence is in every respect vouch-
safed to that part of Poland which fell to Austria, namely,
Galicia and Lodomeria, with the capitals of Cracow and
Lemberg.

When Poland had actually fallen, the leading patriots
began to realize the sins and follies which had eaten so
much of the marrow of the great nation with the glorious
past, and which had allowed their country to fall an easy
prey to the disciplined and superior power of three mighty
neighbors. Superior Polish women began to aid strongly the
patriots in revivifying the slumbering forces of the masses
of the lowly people who had so long been kept in servi-
tude, prevented from participating in the national progress,
and deprived of education and incentives to patriotism, the
lack of which latter in the common people had been so bit-
terly avenged on the entire nation. Princess Czartoryska,
of the illustrious house of Polish magnates, undertook to
diffuse a universal culture and national consciousness
among the people. By far superior to her, however, was



402 WOMAN

Klementyna Tariska, born in 1798 in Warsaw, who, in her
Gallicized country, did not at first even learn her national
language, but had to make herself familiar with it through
study. In 1824 she began her literary activity, and strongly
influenced ethically and nationally the society of her time,
especially the women and the newly rising generation.
This activity was intensified when, in 1827, she became
superintendent of all the girls' schools in Warsaw. Mar-
ried at the age of thirty to the historian Hoffmann, she
left Poland and died in France in 1845. Her writings are
of classical purity; and her services to the Polish language,
which in its present literary worth and linguistic form is
equal to any in existence, cannot be overestimated. Her
historical portraits of the glorious past of her nation and of
its great literary luminaries exercised a powerful influence
upon the education of the young Poles, inasmuch as she
vivified old Polish tradition and history. Her Jan Kocha-
nowski at C^arnolas reveals the golden era of Polish litera-
ture: its environment, its great personalities of both sexes,
the old Polish virtues and qualities which made the nation
powerful, the commonwealth strong and prosperous. In
short, this great Polish woman strove to raise her sisters
to a higher plane of responsibility, of wifehood and of
motherhood, in order to produce a new and better genera-
tion of men of Polish men withal. She was an opponent
to the virago type of advocates of the emancipation of
women who desired to arrogate to themselves what is
by natural laws the domain of man. But realizing that
the political conditions might make fearful gaps in the
ranks of Polish men, and that there might be hundreds
of thousands of widows and orphans, she desired to open
to women all possible avenues of independent life and
work, and to set before them the ideal of toil toil with
the hands and toil with the head as the one worthy



WOMEN OF POLAND 403

purpose of life. The works of this remarkable Polish
author were edited in 1877, in twelve volumes, with an
introduction, by another important Polish writer and ex-
traordinary woman, Gabriele Narzyssa Zmichowska, who
herself wrote admirable tales and a collection of charming
lyric poems which reveal a lofty soul and a melancholy
disposition. 4

Klementyna Tanska's fears of a depopulation of her
beloved country became a reality by the revolution of
1831 . Deaths on the battlefield, wholesale exiles to Siberia,
political flight and emigration en masse, deprived Poland of
numbers of her noblest sons. Those who remained be-
hind were cowed, and reduced to servile obedience: no
wonder that Poland's women lost much of their former
admiration for, and dependence upon, the strong sex.
They began to realize that they must become independ-
ent, and wage the campaign of nationalism for themselves,
if the Polish language, literature, and genius were to be
saved, or a regeneration of the aftergrowth was to be pos-
sible. The right of a higher, or rather of the highest
education for woman was demanded, to enable her to
participate effectively in the political problems of the
nation, in the social questions and the welfare of the race,
to free her from the shackles of conventionalism which
had reduced woman well-nigh to the standard of a social
toy or an adornment of the " salon."

Women were trained to work, to live up to the higher
ideals of life and nationality, to subordinate the common
petty interests to a higher, more universally human exist-
ence. A circle of superior women, the so-called enthu-
siasts, gathered around Gabriele Zmichowska, who worked
for the rights of man, for the abolition of servitude, for the
free development of the natural forces of their great race.
The result was that Gabriele languished for two years in



404



WOMAN



the fortress of Lublin and the other prominent members
of her circle were scattered by persecution. But Polish
women thus attained their revolutionary citizenship, and,
confessedly or not, they belong to the irreconcilables in
the political systems of Prussia and Russia, biding their
time, knowing well that an open resistance, instead of the
policy of passive and latent opposition, would be both
unwise and untimely.

Sociological questions have become prominent in dena-
tionalized Poland, and Polish women have been drawn into
their discussion. The tariff barrier between Poland and
Russia having been abolished, commerce and industry were
turned into wider channels. The revolution of 1863, ill
prepared and ill executed, failed utterly, and the only hope
left for the nation was progress along economic lines.
The great work of the czar-liberator, Alexander II., who
released the Russian peasantry from servitude, also revo-
lutionized the problems of economic sustenance in Poland:
the struggle for existence under the changed conditions.
Poland, placed as she is between Russia and her power-
ful western neighbors, quickly became an industrial
centre. Polish women came forward with their legiti-
mate claims to participate in this material movement.
They had no easy victory. The Russian government,
as such, excluded Polish women ipso facto, even more
rigidly than Polish men. But the breadless women forced
their way into the factories, the offices, and the work-
shops, i.e., into commerce and industry. Finally, even
the state recognized their punctuality, conscientiousness,
and frugality, and all this with consequent cheaper wages,
and received them in the postal, the telegraph, and even
in the railway service, and as clerks in the courts.

The teaching profession is still most sought by women,
though instruction, in all the schools, is almost entirely in